


Ghost in the Machines

by Dulcidyne



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Control Ending, F/M, Gen, Post ME3
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-03-23
Updated: 2013-09-04
Packaged: 2017-12-06 05:29:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 17,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/731960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dulcidyne/pseuds/Dulcidyne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Weeks after the disappearance of the Reapers a young girl discovers a mysterious fragment of reaper tech containing the memories of Commander Shepard. Garrus Vakarian and the crew of the recently returned Normandy struggle to discover what Shepard has become and what her control of the Reapers means for humanity.<br/>--On Hiatus--</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. And Now I See With Eye Serene

It was surreal to stand in a city and view a skyline almost entirely devoid of glass and metal. Against the burnished vault of sky stood the broken remains of hardier buildings, jagged teeth thrusting into the ruined mouth of sunset. Without vertical walls bisecting the open spaces around him, he felt dangerously exposed. His trigger finger itched.

The Reapers shattered their collective civilizations and left them to sweep up the fragmented mess into rolling piles of rubble. Narrow avenues between these hills of London functioned as roads, makeshift tents forming a new city atop the bones of the old.

Three fingers flexed together, discomforted . His hands felt empty in a way that distracted him with the maddening, irritating compulsion to do anything other than let them dangle uselessly. But he knew better than to try to suppress the compulsion jackknifing through his fingertips and settled into the constant motion of his own hands searching desperately for something to fix.

 **** A group of human children darted around in the powdered concrete and vaporized metal haze and he realized these humans would spend their childhood in this dark gap in civilization, their lives spent reconstructing what was lost.

 **** That dismal fact seemed to be lost on the huddled crowds gathering between the broken corpses of skyscrapers. Energy imbued the city with the sharp, electric crackle of life. It reminded him of Purgatory after Cerberus hit the Citadel, with its fierce denial of mortality. Laughter bubbled up from the tents and the faint bass of club music thumped in the distance.

 **** He yearned for an excuse to draw his Phaeston and realized, with a dizzying jolt, that even if he had one, the Phaeston was long gone by now--buried beneath the ruined remains of an upside-down IFV.

 **** “Scars! Thought you’d be off world by now.”

A meaty hand clapped him on the shoulder.

“Man, when I was ordered to rendezvous with the turian VIP, I thought they were talking about someone important at least.”

Garrus spared Vega a look of the severely put-upon, “You can imagine my own disappointment then. I take it you are the Alliance liaison?”

“Sure am, straight off the Normandy and into a cushy diplomatic gig in couple days. Wonder who I impressed by saving the galaxy?”

Vega's eyes were suddenly anywhere that would not mean continuing eye contact. Pushing aside his instinct for knowing exactly when someone was hiding the truth, Garrus thumped his glove against the marine’s shoulder.

“Did you just want to stand here and enjoy the view or were you planning on showing me where I’m going to sleep?”

Grinning sheepishly, Vega started forward and gestured for Garrus to follow. As they walked, he launched into a rundown of the situation in London.

“The whole city has pretty much been flattened. Obviously the Alliance didn’t want to start up refugee camps here but the crazy bastards refuse to leave. Had to do something, couldn’t let them just sleep in the rubble. All standing buildings have been repurposed for the time being until we know for sure the reapers aren’t just taking a breather. All military is officially on standby.”

 **** They drew closer to a vast bridge of a strange, ornate architecture. A relic of history juxtaposed against the near complete ruination of humanity. The creamy stone was surprisingly intact. On either side of its stone edifices, filthy water churned in sluggish brown currents.

Noticing Garrus’s attention drifting to the Thames, Vega stopped.

“You up for a swim or something Scars?” he paused, brow furrowing, “Can turians even swim?”

_“Looks like I’ll be heading back to the Normandy to take a shower before I can get anything done. You and those vids are a bad influence Vakarian.”_

_His smirk was anything but repentant._

_“We could always take a dip.” He gestured towards the distant blue of the Presidium reservoir glinting beyond the dark tint of the skycar windows._

_It wasn't a serious suggestion for obvious reasons._

_She flashed a sly grin at him and continued searching the floor of the skycar for a piece of clothing._

_“What, we haven't broken enough regulations today? ”_

_**** Leaning forward, he removed the white fabric from the steering controls and dangled it out to her._

_"Riight,” He drawled, “You're so by-the-book and all."_

_Pulling the shirt over her head, she favored him with her affectionate brand of amusement, "I just prefer you without water in your lungs. "_

  _He didn’t say it, but he loved her seeing her like this--hair matted and messy,  the metallic gleam of strands sticking out in odd directions, ruffled by her shirt. Maybe it was a streak of possessiveness on his part. This was the Shepard only he saw. The flush on her neck and face, the moisture dotting her skin. No trace of the hero, just the woman._

“No.” Garrus finally said, dragging his eyes from the murky water, “No we can’t.”

The London on the other side of the bridge was in much better shape than the London they had just left. The ground had been completely cleared and a hastily constructed wall stretched far to the left and right of the military checkpoint, humming the low sound of powerful kinetic barriers.

Vega waved at the man slouching in the armored viewbox and a second later the massive metal doors before them opened with a long metallic creek. Before him stretched a scene of such familiar efficiency, Garrus felt a pang of nostalgia for his months of boot camp on Palavan.

Identical rows of portable field bunkers formed perfect lines extending off into the far distance. To his immediate left hulked a host of IFVs gleaming dull grey in the red cast of sunset. The space swarmed with soldiers, platoons of marines performing drills in the vast dirt fields, the expanse of ‘road’ before them packed with people hustling from one side of the base to the other, puffs of dirt kicked up to haze the world in dust. Through the billowing earth Garrus even spotted near-finished buildings nestled in steel scaffolding.

The air held none of the celebratory energy from the rubble of London. Here it was thick with anticipation, the weighted moment of tension when hell is just about to break loose. It felt like a balm against the frayed ends of his nerves, stilling the frenetic movements of his fingers.

This was the way it was supposed to be.

Vega led him the way to a bunker indistinguishable from the others but relatively easy to locate being that it was closest to the wall. It was the kind meant to fit in a few rows of cots, packing ten or more men into a single space. When they stepped inside, there was only his footlocker set at the foot of a single cot and a workbench.

His browplate shifted upwards.

Vega caught the inquisitive look, gesturing to the vast open space.

“Higher ups figured you wouldn’t play nice with others.” He joked, big white teeth a stark contrast to his tan. When Garrus failed to respond in kind, the smile dropped out of existence.

“Jeez Scars, take a joke. Probably thought you didn’t want to be bothered by a bunch of marines while you were calibrating or whatever you do with your free time.”

The dark line of his eyebrows furrowed deeply and Garrus realized that the easy-going bravado had all been for his benefit. Vega was changed. Garrus could see that now, could recognize that hollow look carefully hidden behind layers of humor.

Embarrassment and anger fused together into a lump of sinking metal in his gut. He nearly snarled for Vega to take the damn jokes elsewhere and find him a new liaison while he was at it. As he opened his mouth a sensation clamped down on the rancor in his throat with such force it felt as if his windpipe had been physically crushed.

Vega of all people. With the ridiculous musculature, stupid nicknames, the naïve enthusiasm not yet twisted by war and death into practical cynicism. It was that enthusiasm that made him seem younger than he actually was, despite his combat prowess. Garrus always found himself checking his pessimism whenever Vega was around. And now here was Vega doling out the same protective treatment. To him.

Garrus took a deep breath and it helped but his voice was still a bit rough.

“I could use a drink. You?”

“Well, technically I’m on duty.”

“Consider hitting up a bar with the ‘turian advisor’ to fall under those parameters.” Garrus said.

“I’m pretty sure the place I’m thinking of doesn’t have turian beer.”

Garrus strode over to the footlocker, snapping it open to pull out a half-filled bottle of turian liquor. The bottle glowed soft aquamarine, deceptively pretty. Garrus had once used it in a pinch to dissolve sealant.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got that covered.”

 **** To call the place a bar would be something like calling the pyjak an intelligent species, it only fit in the loosest of definitions. Garrus hadn’t been expecting much, but he also didn’t quite expect this. The design was an ingenious use of salvaged materials. Rows of bright vending machines formed the walls and the roof was a quilted tarp of silver emergency blankets. A portable generator hummed in a dark corner, providing the energy to power the garish fluorescent designs on the machine walls.

Vega approached the bar, which looked to be two metal bookshelves placed on their sides and covered with a sheet of dented metal, and shouted his order above the din. Vega’s sheer bulk made the process seem much easier than it actually was. Garrus estimated this place was big enough to fit in 30 people at the most. There had to be at least a hundred humans crammed in the space, most of them soldiers.

The crowd shifted, allowing the bartender to open up a vivid panel on the machine and withdraw a dark bottle from the refrigerated racks. Garrus pushed against the surge, finally making his way to the marine.

“Not really what I had in mind.” Garrus shouted.

This was the opposite of taking the edge of. Serving on freighters cured him long ago of any discomfort in closed spaces. But this place was stifling, thick with the scent of people and the humid warmth of bodies.

“Don’t worry.” Vega shouted, “Just wait.”

Sure enough, thirty minutes later and the place had almost completely emptied out.

“Curfew,” Vega explained, “Drinking isn’t technically restricted off duty but they had to do something to get people to cut back. There was a point when pretty much everyone was hung over during morning drills.”

Garrus wasn’t surprised. There was a lot to forget lately.

With the crowds gone, it was possible to hear the music. It was slow, a woman’s husky voice crooning out melancholy lyrics to the sounds of mournful instruments. Garrus found it oddly fitting for a salvaged bar in the ruins of London. A shot of aquamarine disappeared down his throat, searing the lining of his esophagus in a slow tingling burn and creating a false sense of warmth in his stomach.

He noticed Vega avoided asking what he was doing here, what he was supposed to be advising exactly. Garrus filed the observation away and tried to get what news he could about Palavan. Reliable information was hard to come by, given the handful of functional comm buoys.

“Reports are saying it’s pretty much just like Earth. Can’t support all the refugees who came in from the colonies and can’t ship them back to where they came from. It’s all just waiting for the relays to start working again.”

Garrus nodded. It was old news already. The Trebia, Aralakh, and Parnitha relays were operational days after Sol’s, allowing the fleets to retreat back to their respective systems. The quarian and geth fleets remained in the Sol system, but they were hardly in danger of any dire food shortages. The problem was the colonies established in other systems, the majority of which were still dark. Additionally, the reapers were cunningly efficient in the careful destruction of supply lines. What wasn’t already destroyed was now feasibly unobtainable without relay travel. Fuel shortages abounded, asteroid and planet mining brought to a near standstill.

Earth wasn’t so bad off, Garrus realized. Humanity’s relative newness to spacefaring meant that there were still abundant resources available through FTL travel. He could already imagine the political embroilments occurring over this. Perhaps that was the reason Liara was on a shuttle to see the new Asari councilor the moment the Normandy docked. He had a sinking suspicion that a similar summons awaited him in his public mail account.

“Got family in Elysium myself.” The bartender spoke up, looking up at them, “Can’t wait for that damn relay to self-repair.”

Garrus maintained a carefully neutral expression. Not that it mattered, humans generally couldn't read turian expressions well enough to tell neutral from anything else.

Vega said nothing and drained his beer, “This isn’t bad Malone, where’d you find this stuff?”

“Alliance still hasn’t tracked where those radiation spikes in the sensor data came from?” Garrus asked.

“They think that it was a burst of energy from the relay itself and not ships like the data suggested.”

Garrus leaned forward on the scratched metal bar top, “Really,” he said, “That’s interesting.”

He had a hunch that whatever Hackett’s request to meet was for, it had something to do with the shroud of mystery surrounding the ‘self-repairing’ relays and the ghostly echo of heat. By EDI’s analysis, the thermal signatures indicated multiple sources, shooting to hell whatever information the Alliance was propagating.

He thought about the EDI and  the Normandy docked in an one of the few functional spaceports spared by the Reapers, an obscure backwater thing hours away from London by shuttle. He wondered how quickly the Alliance would scatter her crew. If Vega’s new ‘gig’ proved anything, it was the Alliance’s efficiency in dismantling everything Shepard built. Well, they had more than enough practice at it.

“We should head back Scars. Some of us have to be up at the crack of dawn.”

They walked in silence. Garrus felt the acidic burn of the alcohol but none of its relaxing haziness. This was a disturbing revelation given that barely any of the liquid remained in the sleek container. The fact that it was the second bottle he’d emptied in three days was equally disturbing. He had never been one to fall into a bottle no matter what the temptation.

Vega stopped without warning, chin tipped up, eyes on the distant object fixed into the night sky. Tiny lights bloomed like stars arranged into a strange pattern, a shape dim but visible against the dark haze of the atmosphere. The Citadel.

Another thing stranded in the Sol system.

Garrus looked away almost immediately.

“So why’d you stay?” Vega asked, “Sparks and the Doc were on shuttles offworld the second we landed.”

 **** He didn’t have a good answer yet. The last place he wanted to be was on Earth with the Citadel looming in the sky. But he wasn’t about to tell anyone the truth.

The truth was something he hid deep in his bones, away from the harsh scrutiny of realism and better judgement. Hope that only a fool could entertain, buried in his marrow with the stubborn denial of that metal plaque fixed on the memorial wall on the Normandy.

“Just can’t shake the feeling that there’s more left to do.” he finally said.

“Stuck trying to save the galaxy huh.”

His mandibles fluttered into a humorless approximation of a smile. A routine of heroism ingrained by habit. Ex-C-Sec, former military, failed vigilante, an advisor to an enemy that had vanished nearly a month ago. What was left of him except habit? It was the kind of question he avoided asking himself lately. Introspection left him in the same dark alleys of his mind and it was harder and harder to find his way out the more it happened.

 **** "Well hey, Scars, its good to see you here...because I'm pretty sure you're right."

Alone in the bunker, Garrus set himself to the task of sorting through the influx of private messages. Sorting generally meant deleting unless absolutely necessary. There was a short message from Solana, demanding he haul his ass to the next shuttle off Earth. Garrus sighed, almost replying before clicking on to the next message.

Met with the asari councilor on the Citadel. Ran into Kaidan. Very curious as to why he was not asked to attend the briefing with Hackett, being that he is Alliance. Too many questions and not enough information.  Will be in London tomorrow.  
Liara

Next was a request from the new turian councilor to make an appearance on the Citadel. Garrus snorted, deleting the message. Liara could go play diplomat if she wanted to. He had no intention of entangling himself within politics no matter how far he had moved up through the gaping vacancies in the meritocracy.

Garrus,  
Won’t be able to make the meeting with Hackett. Spiked a fever. Nothing serious, but I’ll have to stay with the Fleet until it passes.  
Eat something,   
Tali

There was no doubt in his mind that it was, in fact, more serious than Tali let on. Anything really minor and she would be on her way to Earth, sniffling and sneezing. He frowned at the timing of it. She had seemed fine when she left the Normandy only two days ago...well, what passed for fine these days.

Garrus shut the terminal off, browplates drawn together in thought. His mind drifted to Shepard, a tidal surge caught in the inexorable lunar pull of her.

 **** He flicked the terminal back on and read the forensics report over again. It was becoming a ritual of his, as devout as any religious ceremony: searching for new truths buried between lines he already knew by heart. The report was detatched and clinical, incongrous phrases like ‘incineration thresholds’ and 'inconclusive scorching patterns' attempting to apply logic to something that belonged more in the realm of mystical.  Vanished, without a trace. An ellipses where a period should be.

 **** How many times did he catch himself already primed to make a joke whenever the doors to the main battery hissed open? Or find himself in the elevator, staring at her door and realizing that he pressed the wrong floor out of instinct? 

He had looked out at the wreckage of London framed by the shuttle door and turning to say something to her, something comforting and reassuring to the spot where Shepard should be but wasn’t. No wry twist of lips, no flutter of cropped hair, just a gap in the universe that swallowed him whole.

 

* * *

 

_Mud squelches into the spaces between her toes as she wriggles them deeper into the cool earth. Star-bright air glows between the gaps in the trees, crescents of silver forming intricate patterns on the shadowed ground. It smells like summer is fading; nights sneaking into the reservoir after 10:00 when it finally got dark, dares and shy kisses, naked knees scabbed over; the clear, sweet note of adolescence transforming into the tenor of autumn and burgeoning responsibility._

_A pebble bites into her heel but she doesn’t stop. Air streams around her body and she can almost feel it lift her off the ground, she’s running so fast._

_Her lungs expand and fill with wind-whipped oxygen. It circulates through her veins, effervescent and heady like a sip of alcohol purloined from a parent’s stash. She feels it tingle through her brain._

_A vista of soy fields meets the edge of blue, two hemispheres welded together in the distance. Grass pillows her fall and she gulps down huge drafts of summer sky._

_Underneath her back, she can feel the vast movement of the planet, Mindoir’s tectonic plates shifting miles and miles below, rumbling in muffled echoes dwarfing her very existence. Above her, the dome of sky and stars stretches on forever._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my first foray into Mass Effect fanfiction and my second into fanfiction in general (the first was in high school. It involved Sailor Moon and overall terribleness). My brain likes to pull this funny trick on me where it only wants to write whenever I have a major deadline looming in the horizon. The result of which will be spotty chapter updates as I scramble to study for exams or write my 20-source lit review on cortico-striatal-thalamic circuits. 
> 
> I'd like to mention that I'm not attempting to champion any one ending over the other. I personally went high-EMS Destroy for purely selfish reasons. However, I really like the idea of the Control ending because of how flawed and problematic I think it would be. I want to know how the Alliance went from fearing and hating the Reapers to letting them crawl over London and fix infrastructure. Quite the change of heart in my book. Factor in a God-like intelligence framed after a controversial and possibly traitorous woman and I had to take a crack at writing that mess. So, this was the result. My editing skills are not so great when it comes to fiction so I hope any readers out there will bear with my grammatical fumblings.
> 
> <3s Dulcidyne


	2. The Very Pulse of the Machine

Dr. Liara T’soni was not a very good information broker. Not anymore. The majority of her contacts were either dead or in systems that remained dark. She felt their collective silence like a thousand missing limbs.

Leaning against the stiff back of her chair, she inspected the sterile corners of the room. It exuded military minimalism : sleek white panels forming the walls and floors, all sharp edges and clean lines. Even the air had a sharpness to it, lingering echoes of chemicals drifting in cold currents flowing from the floor vents.

The austerity was aggressive, as if the facility was designed with intimidation in mind. She fidgeted in her uncompromising chair, shifting her weight from thigh to thigh, before a small voice in her mind reprimanded the show of nerves. The scolding voice in her head always sounded like her mother.

A metallic hiss drew her attention to the door panel sliding open, exposing a slim figure entering the room.

“Garrus.”

The tense line of his shoulders slackened as he met her wan smile, “Liara. Good to see someone who has an idea why we’re here .”

He looked around, noting the motion of the security cameras tucked in the high corners as contracting apertures traced his movement.

She shook her head ruefully, “I’m afraid I’m as much in the dark as you seem to be…will you sit?”

He declined with a terse shake of his head, opting to lean against the wall, “Can’t seem to sit down lately. Feels too indulgent.”

There was a falseness to his sardonic tone and she did not begrudge him it. But she couldn’t stop her eyes from drifting away and focusing on the floor. It hurt to look at him too long. All she could see was a metal plate catching the gleam of the lights in the Normandy, the name embossed in white letters. Pain welled up around the pinpricks of memory.

“Why do you think they requested us specifically? “

She tried to focus on his voice, blinking back the sudden moisture gathering in her eyes. She had no right to cry in front of him when he bore it all with his particular brand of Turian stoicism.

“I…don’t…I don’t know.” Her voice quivered and she took a deep breath, “Being that we aren’t even Alliance. Would have been nice if we were given more time to get our bearings”

“I think I got the picture already.” his voice was flat, a humorless deadpan, “ Rubble. Chaos.”

She opened her mouth to reply as the smooth noise of the door sliding open preceded Admiral Hackett’s appearance. He regarded them both with an efficient nod.

“Thank you both for agreeing to meet with me. I must apologize for all the secrecy but I hope you will soon understand how vital it is to restrict this information in any way possible.”

Garrus leveraged himself from the wall to stand straight and gave Hackett a piercing look, “What does the Alliance want with us now?”

His words were clipped, precise and cold all the way through the subtonals. Liara shivered. Rage was easy to identify when it ran hot and furious--a krogan battleroar, the smell of hot metal and the clink of spent heat sinks falling to the ground. Garrus’ fury was unlike anything she was quite accustomed to. It was articulate, it was measured, and it pulled the heat from her veins.

Hackett’s expression was as neutral as ever but she doubted he missed the tension criss-crossing between them. The admiral always gave her the impression of understated shrewdness.

“Almost a week ago, a young girl was hospitalized in Huerta Memorial under strange circumstances.“

Hackett paused and Liara hesitated a glance towards the wall. Vivid blue eyes gleamed like chips of ice, completely disregarding her.

Dragging her attention from Garrus, she made an attempt at focusing on the conversation at hand, “I’m sorry, what sort of strange circumstances do you mean?”

Skin crinkled into folds around the corners of Hackett’s mouth as it compressed down to a thin line. He easily looked twenty years older than the last time she saw him. A terrible feeling pierced through her when she realized when exactly that last time had been--aboard the Normandy before the final push against the Reapers.

“She was discovered in an unconscious state and remained so for fifteen hours, experiencing what seemed to have been vivid dreams, and muttering strange words. Her attending physician, a Dr. Michel, recognized some of the words as names. Your names, specifically.”

She felt Garrus start, mirroring her own surprise in the motion.

Hackett crossed the room, stride uneven from what Liara deduced was an injury sustained weeks ago. As he approached, a module emerged from the sleek wall panel. Suspended in a stasis field hung a finger-sized jut of dark metal etched in blue luminescence.

“In her hand, she had what our scientists have determined is a fragment made of material closely resembling that of the Citadel. “

“But why would a piece of rubble cause such a reaction?” Liara asked, standing up from her chair and walking over to examine the fragment better. It looked rather mundane considering the strange circumstances. She noted the jagged seam along the edge was blackened with some sort of residue. What she wouldn’t give for her old field kit.

Even with his injury, Hackett stood straight-backed in a way that bespoke of professionalism verging into instinctual. A hand smoothed down his dress blue jacket in one efficient motion, “We’re still working on figuring that out. Despite the similarities in construction, it does not compare with anything we’ve seen on the Citadel before.”

“Considering all our knowledge about the Citadel, that isn’t much by the way of a surprise.” Garrus said.

“Perhaps so. Doctor Michel contacted us and we removed the child and the fragment to this facility. She is now fully awake, but has no memory of whatever visions she had while unconscious except for one. From her depictions, we have reason to believe that it is a vision of Mindoir.”

“Shepard.” Garrus breathed, caught up in a moment of hope before better sense settled in, tucking his mandibles back against his jaw and banishing the flicker of warmth from his eyes.

“We aren’t exactly obscure and neither is Mindoir.” He shifted his weight for a moment, almost reluctant, for once, to be the voice of reason, “It’s possible her imagination is just replicating something she saw in school or on a holovid.”

He had overcompensated in the effort to steady his voice and it came out sounding brittle instead of calm. Liara couldn’t help but shoot him the exact look she knew he hated. Garrus did not broker solicitousness well. Predictably, she saw him tense, prickling under her worry.

Hackett watched them steadily and this time she was certain that the Admiral picked up more than he let on. It was almost merciful, his tactful play at missing all their messy emotional fumblings. He nodded to acknowledge Garrus’ point, “Yes, we considered this as well. However, she is able to consistently identify the entire Normandy crew--even its alien crew members--from photo line ups. As far as Mindoir, she can identify it pretty well too--but only images from before the raid.”

“Please.” Liara dragged her eyes from the metal shard, “Take us to her. Perhaps I could help.”

“I was hoping you’d say that Doctor T’Soni.”

Hackett led them through the hall to a room near identical to the last, the product of what Liara suspected was humanity’s most unimaginative architect. But the cold sterility of design was mitigated by bright snatches of color stuck to the institution-white walls. Childish stokes of watery paint splotching blues and greens across sheets paper . It was the same bucolic scene translated into whatever new medium this little girl could get her hands on.

“Hello Emily.” Hackett sat in the chair by the bed where a little girl traced a tube of blue waxy pigment labeled ‘crayon’ onto a piece of paper.

She didn’t look up, her head of dark, springy curls drawn intensely over the sheet. A pink tongue pressed against her lip in an expression of serious concentration, “Hello.”

“Emily, I’d like you to meet two friends of mine: Doctor Liara T’Soni and Garrus Vakarian.”

Garrus hung back by the door behind her and Liara felt something verging on amusement at the sudden show of awkward hesitation from the turian.

Wide eyes looked up from the page, “You’re blue.”

“I am.” Liara drew forward, smiling, “I’m an asari.”

“I know that.” Emily objected, “You’re really blue though. Lusia was more purple.”

“Is Lusia your friend?” Liara asked.

A shadow passed over the girl’s face, “She was.”

Liara quickly changed the subject, “What are you drawing?” she asked, tracing a finger over the waxy blue flakes peeling up from the paper.

“The place in my dream..”

Hackett pressed a soft hand to the little girl’s small shoulder, “Emily. Could you let Doctor T’Soni see your dream?”

Emily looked between them, “How could I do that?’

“You won’t have to do anything.” Liara placed her hand over the small dark one on the page and marveled for a brief second at how fragile it seemed beneath her own.

“Will it hurt?”

Her eyes were remarkable, wide and solemn. Liara’s fingers tightened gently, “No. It might feel a little strange but I promise it won’t hurt.”

Emily seemed to take this into serious consideration for a moment before nodding decisively.

“All right.”

Liara smiled and her eyes went black.

_A vista of soy fields meets the edge of blue, two hemispheres welded together in the distance. Grass pillows her fall and she gulps down huge drafts of summer sky._  
 _Underneath her back, she can feel the vast movement of the planet, Mindoir’s tectonic plates shifting miles and miles below, rumbling in muffled echoes dwarfing her very existence. Above her, the dome of sky and stars stretches on forever._

_Looking up makes her dizzy and its as if she’s falling, spinning, upwards into the galaxy._

_An insect wing brushes against her cheek and she can hear the rough scratch of the cricket’s legs as it jumps through the long grass._

_When that pink, impossibly tiny infant at home is old enough, she’ll bring him here. She won’t let him trip on the rocks and twist his ankle like Taj did the first time they snuck out to the reservoir after dark. An arrow of fierce protectiveness pierces through her sternum, reverberating through her bone marrow. She is a big sister now._

“Are you alright?” Hackett’s hand was at her elbow, steadying her as she swayed lightly on her feet.

“Yes...yes. It was...” Liara paused, “Emily, how are you?”

The child shrugged, “My brain feels tingly” and picked up her crayon again.

Liara twisted her fingers in one hand, “It definitely felt like Shepard. I’m certain it was a memory of hers from Mindoir.”

“Was there anything else?” Garrus asked.

“No.” Liara frowned, “It doesn’t make sense. Even if the other memories were incomprehensible to her mind or suppressed in some way, I would have still been able to sense them.”

Her heart was racing, adrenaline and fear churning dark currents in her blood. She knew what she had to do.

“I’ll need to touch the shard myself.” she said.

“Liara--” Garrus started.

She cut him off, resolve set in the line of her jaw, “I’m well aware of the risk Garrus.”

Hackett simply nodded. “It’s your decision Doctor. ”

His hand brushed Emily’s shoulder again and he looked very grandfatherly when he smiled down at the girl, “We’ll be back to see you soon Emily.”

Liara and Garrus bid their farewells, one more tentatively than the other, and followed Hackett out into the hall.

“Does she have family?” Liara finally asked when they stopped, waiting for Hackett’s security clearance to usher the door open.

She hadn’t wanted to ask, because she already knew the answer. If she scrutinized too closely, she would touch on the barely healed scars of older answers. Being the galaxy’s greatest information broker during the Reaper war exposed her to thousands like the one Hackett was about to tell her and the tales of the dead cut like knives.

Shadows found their way into the lines of his face, “She appears on the log of refugee arrivals from a privately owned Helium-3 mining facility a week or so after the initial attacks on Earth. We assume her family did not survive the attack.”

The door slid open and the fragment’s stasis field cast a faint blue glow in the empty room. Her heart shuddered in her chest and she could not discern if she was more frightened or excited.

She stepped into the room.

She could do this.

Her feet carried her to the module and she paused before it, unsnapping the seals at her wrists and letting her glove come away to expose a blue hand. A tremble worked its way through her tendons as she stared at the suspended sliver of mysterious metal and blue light.

Clamping down on the surge of erratic energy rushing through her limbs, Liara thrust her bare hand into the stasis field. Her fingertips curled around the fragment.

She owed Shepard this much.

_She unfurls. Peptide polymers fraying at molecular ends; electron probabilities in breaking bonds coalescing into certainty and stillness one by one as kinetic energy descends into absolute zero. No, she realizes, it is time that has gone still. Or perhaps it is both. Evaporating neurons struggle to process which before winking out of existence. Memories flicker and flare in the pulses of neuronal death throes and she sees their faces bloom and dim; supernovas on a molecular scale collapsing into voids after billions of frozen millenia. Liara. Tali. Kaidan. Ashley. Wrex. Mordin.Garrus..._

_Garrus. She feels the beauty of it so acutely that her consciousness screams in agony._

_Her father touches the waxy green pod of the soy plant, fingers rough and smudged with soil. She peers at them, cataloging the ridges of his fingerprints--cold new clarity rendering the organic data into the sharp lines and bisecting edges of logic. Fingerprints: physiological markers of human biological diversity. Primates fumbling for greatness, manipulating organic life around them in the drive to proliferate. One of countless sentient species evolving, reproducing, and fading in blinks of time. Their extinctions are minute fluctuations of enthalpy and entropy shifting in and out of universal equilibriums._

_Smaller fingerprints. Shattered metacarpals pinch the stiff, oxygen-deprived skin tissue and the boy's hand flops into her own. Her brother's body is obscured by the rubble of prefab walls dark with smoke. The air is warm, oxygen sparking and igniting in cobalt flares that scream high-pitched electromagnetic frequencies. Sensory input distorts into approximations of emotion without translation. Amalgams of sensation flicker through optical stimuli. Vivid blue. Energy diffuses through the cold and she senses the motion of slumbering atoms awakening around her. Probability and uncertainty proliferate into kinetic chaos and brush against her being._

_Chaos and order exist in appositional states. Is. Isn't. A woman. A machine. Memory. Data. Cold..._

_Warmth._

“Liara!”

Pressure on her arm splintered into confused, vivid fractals of color. She could taste it in her mouth, could smell violets and russet oranges forming sunsets in her nasal passages. Her mind dazzled in simple, pure wonder.

“She’s seizing...we need a doctor”

The word ‘doctor’ twitched like a struggling thing in her mind, pulling on the gossamer strands like spiderwebs in her head. Doctor. She was. Vibrations traveled through the webs, strings oscillating discordantly. It hurt--the chords of cords screaming and scratching inside her skull. She needed to cut the...

Abruptly, the world shifted. Fragments of sensation realigned into one seamless image: Garrus was holding her down by the arms. Hackett’s face was lined with age and worry, peering down at her. She was on the floor. Cold, sterile light made everything too bright, spiking pain between her temples. Liara moaned, trying to sit up.

White panels blurred and liquified, elongating carbon glass into abstract with her motion. She shut her eyes and pressed a hand to her throbbing skull. Something warm and wet trickled over her lips and she realized, her mind slow and fuzzy, that she tasted blood.

“What happened?”

Her voice sounded a world away.

“You touched the shard and collapsed.” Hackett answered

Pain anchored her to her body, but she could feel her mind floating above the scene, tethered but disconnected. The shard was on the floor a foot away and by instinct, Hackett and Garrus had given it wide berth. It caught the light of the room like a knife. She wondered if she was about to vomit.

“I’m going to find one of the doctors.” Hackett said.

Garrus helped her to a chair and Liara heard the door open and close over the rush of blood surging through her head.

“What did you see?” he finally asked.

Her stomach clenched, tightening in on itself like fingers folding into a fist. She was going to vomit, Goddess, she was absolutely going to vomit. The fragment drew her eyes and she stared at it, nausea subsiding. It seemed...brighter than before.

“I don’t...I can’t describe it.”

Death. Beyond death. Beyond anything she could comprehend. She pressed her hand to her head and stared at the shard. The glow intensified and fragmented into ascending flickers of projected light.

Garrus followed her gaze, browplates drawing together as a form took shape, familiar enough to send a hot stab of pain through her stomach. It solidified. Hair cropped short, high cheekbones, the smattering of freckles traced in blue light.

Liara was on her feet in seconds, the clatter of the chair against the floor a distant echo. Her own voice was small in her own ears, a tiny gasp of disbelief, “Shepard?”


	3. A Traveler Between Life and Death

"Shepard?"

The voice, barely a rasp of a whisper, sounded puzzlingly familiar. Liara couldn't quite place it, which was irritating in a muffled, fuzzy sort of way, like an itch wrapped in layers of fabric. She knew somehow that the answer was the most obvious thing imaginable, but even that realization was just a dull, distant niggling sensation. 

A hand trembled before her, lavender blanching away from the five jointed digits. It was so very blue and so very pale....and hers.

Just as the voice had been. Odd that she felt no more connected to either than she did to the upended metal curve of the chair leg to her left. She was disconnected, severed from her body in the first moment of shock radiating from a single high-pressure thought.

Shepard was alive.

It was too much to believe. Hope had played her, drawing her to this place and leaving her stupid and incredulous when the moment came. Her soul drifted, untethered from the miniscule gravitational field exerted by flesh and bone while her mind groped for some tenuous connection that might anchor her back into reality.

“No.”

Liara started, realizing that not only was Garrus there, but had spoken. She also realized her knees were smarting, future bruises blossoming beneath her armor.

The cold fury radiating from him eclipsed anything she had seen earlier. His mandibles were tight against his jaw, near flush with the sharp angle and vibrating with tension. He looked terrifying and predatorial. He looked like he wanted nothing more than to lunge forward and rip the module apart with his naked talons.

His voice pared through her confusion. Measured and slow, “That is not Shepard.”

Now that the afterimages had cleared, a hundred things screamed wrong to her. The posture was off, no cocked hip, no crossed arms. The expression was unlike any Shepard ever wore: utterly empty. Vibrant eyes turned vacant. It looked like someone had posed a Shepard doll into a holographic display.

“I am Commander Shepard’s collective memories, thoughts, and moral code. Her consciousness elevated beyond human comprehension. “

That voice. She was suddenly so cold. Her body began to shiver uncontrollably as air crystallized in the spaces of her lungs.

“What has Hackett done?” Garrus was stepping forward, suddenly taller and more imposing than Liara could remember seeing him, “What is this? Some kind of A.I. the Alliance cooked up with Reaper tech?”

“I exist because of a choice made by the woman I was.”

The voice was undeniably Shepard’s, if you took her voice and scrubbed all emotional inflection to overlay the ghostly impressions of synthetic over the husky alto.  
The fury that was Garrus Vakarian seemed to crumple before her eyes. In a second, he was diminished. Vulnerable and bare in the middle of this freezing room. He seemed unable to speak. When he finally did, his smooth pitch fractured.

“What choice?”

“The choice to assume control of the Reapers.”

Mandibles fluttered in weak protest, “That was the Illusive Man’s dream, not hers.”

“It was a choice that allowed her to preserve all life in this cycle--organic and synthetic.”

If Shepard was alive and imprisoned somehow by the Reapers-- indoctrinated or…something far more sinister-- that was worse than her simply being dead wasn’t it?

“Is Shepard alive?”

Her own voice was a stranger to her. She marveled at how calm it sounded.

“Shepard is immortal. Her consciousness is timeless and infinite. But her physical form does not exist in your perception of reality.”

_Serenity is the acceptance of the universe, Little Wing. To accept transience and impermanence. Not to grieve for what has passed, but understand that it must happen._

She thought she understood what that meant. Not yet a thousand and she thought this was a lesson she didn't need to be taught. She was sure that when the time came, she would find serenity in loss. 

Reaching back into her memory, she wanted to shake the idiot version of herself unmarked by love and death, take her by the shoulders and ask why she so blindly assumed this would be so easy. Eddies of loathing, rancid and thick, coagulated in her veins. But she was no longer sure if it was directed at the person she was or the person she became. Her hope was a twisted thing, born half out of love and half out of desperation. It had driven her to Cerberus. She knew with a certainty that it would drive her to anything, anything to avoid that one absolute finality.

“What do you want from us?”

Grief had scraped her throat raw, “What could we possibly have to offer you?”

There was a flicker of something in the holographic details of her face. Liara wondered if emotion and shock were taking a larger toll on her senses and waved away the curiosity surfacing beneath the well of her despair.

The image flickered once again and vanished.

The doors opened, the quiet slide of metal against metal, and a man entered the room. He was older, white hair frosting his temples and hard lines carving his features into harsh relief. Liara recognized him immediately, although the images on the data feeds didn’t convey the scale of the actual person--barrel chested, broad shouldered, and the sort of musculature filling out a suit that hinted at strength. But it wasn’t just the military frame softened by decades of civilian life that made him seem so large--it was his presence. He took up the entire room, one implacable human wall.

Polyresin jointed into artificial knuckles dangling below the cuff of a charcoal suit and when he moved, his body stiffened and jolted in mechanical lurches. Seven titanium rods, according to the medical records in the dossier she had assembled on him, seven rods and sixteen interlocking metal pins holding his spine together after a chunk of asteroid obliterated twelve blocks of Xi’an’s residential district during the Relay 314 Incident. It was an injury that spelled the end of his military career and the very beginnings of his political ascent from rural senator to the interim leader of the Systems Alliance.

“Prime Minister Briggs.” Liara said, by way of an introduction.

His eyes snapped over her and Garrus, shifting from assessing to dismissing in the span of seconds before settling on the fragment. There was no trace of surprise on his face.

She glanced up at the cameras. He must have been watching the whole thing unfold. He expected this.

Briggs’s voice was rich and congenial. The hint of a twang curling at the ends of his syllables lent his words a musical quality, “To be frank, I wasn’t so sure this would work.”

“You used us...” Liara started.

Briggs flashed her a smile she'd seen a dozen times over in news feeds devoted to the Alliance's emergency political figurehead. It was brimming with charm and lacked real warmth, "I'm afraid it was something of a necessity..."

His eyes slid back to the metal shard, “You see, we weren't the ones she wanted to speak to."

“Where is Hackett?” Liara demanded, "Was he a part of this?"

As a politician, Briggs played his irritation perfectly. To the uninitiated, his manner was almost jovial. He clucked his tongue against his mouth, a rueful sound, "The Admiral is not privy to all matters of Alliance security. Especially considering his...personal bias when it comes to the Commander."

In the handful of days on Earth, already she had seen it; the darkening current of the political tides sweeping over the planet. Humanity wanted victory, not the possibility of war still looming in dark space. Their anger lingered in the particulate smog cloaking the atmosphere. The air on Earth was charged with the restless anticipation of a mob ready for violence. And Briggs was a live wire.

“You know,” Briggs’s rich baritone interrupted her thoughts, “All this talk of working together during the war. Inspiring stuff. Of course, I was inclined to disagree.” his eyes flicked over to Garrus, “Having your spine shattered has that effect on faith in interspecies altruism. “

"Interspecies 'altruism’ completed the Catalyst.” Liara said, “Shepard's diplomacy is the reason we’re all standing here today.”

A subtle shift in expression spoke of rage measured in conviviality, “Sweetheart, the men and women fighting and dying by the thousands on Earth are the reason I’m standing here today. While the Fifth Fleet and the SSV Normandy left Sol to burn, those people bled into the mud to take their home back from the Reapers. Nobody’s making a statue in their honor. Commander Shepard's diplomacy is the reason you are standing here today.”

“And the Catalyst...” his smile flattened, “Did jackshit besides blow the relays as far as I see it.”

It was the stump speech he’d given a dozen times over across Earth. The other half, the missing part, was devoted to putting an end to ‘feeding the greed of other races with humanity’s blood and sweat’. Humanity for humanity and other Terra Firma slogans wrapped up in brand new packaging. It was a popular speech, the hand-picked crowds went wild over it.

“But as I was saying...inspiring stuff, all that. So you can see why I’m so grateful to the two of you for staying on and helping us deal with Shepard.”

A misplaced chuckle found its way into her throat. Or was it a sob? Liara felt the bubble of mirth and grief press against the ragged edges of her esophagus. The ground was shifting beneath her feet. He meant to keep them there whether they wanted to stay or not.

Garrus looked incredibly bored, folding his arms across the scuffed gleam of his armor, “Have to give the Reapers points for innovation. I was starting to get bored of the indoctrination bit.”

Briggs’s gaze fell on him, irritated, “What makes you think this isn’t the indoctrinated Commander Shepard?”

Liara caught the flicker of Garrus’ mandibles. She could almost picture the Viper in his hands, the retort of the shot and the simultaneous spray of crimson in the distance. It was the expression he wore a second before the triumphant 'Scratch one'.

“When you’ve dealt with as many indoctrinated agents as we have, Prime Minister, you just know.”

He was being insufferably cocky and Liara saw a white eyebrow twitch.

“We’re supposed to believe that the Reapers indoctrinated the Hero of the Citadel and just decided to give away the advantage? It’s obvious enough what this is.”

Garrus was definitely enjoying himself. His condescension was a hair too perfect. Liara didn't know what his game was, but it seemed to be working. Briggs was flushed and flustered, the politician’s smile wiped clean from his face and replaced by a scowl of naked disdain. It was the first genuine expression she’d seen on the man.

The Prime Minister shoot a dark look up at the cameras.

“If we’re done humoring the Reapers, Liara and I are expected back on our respective planets.” Garrus said.

It was the wrong thing to say. Stubbornness lodged itself into parenthetical folds of skin framing Briggs' mouth. Garrus had pushed him too far and now the man was digging in his heels.

“I’m afraid not.”

There was a flash of white teeth. It was a smile Traynor would have been envious of. They were so white they looked unnatural against the red stipple of his ruddy flesh.

“We need to limit the spread of this intel. The both of you will stay at this facility until we’ve assessed your security risk. Accommodations have been made.”

The smile turned towards the shard, “Enjoy the reunion. I fear it may be all too short.”

He left and the door’s console panel flashed red behind him.

“So what was that all about?” Liara asked, checking some of her panic for curiosity.

Garrus was awash in the orange glow of his omni-tool interface. The grim set of his eyes confirmed her fears. The short to mid-range transmission frequencies the omni-tools worked on were being scrambled with interference. They could not communicate with anyone outside of the room. His three-digit hand moved rapidly across the interface. He didn’t look up to answer her.

“Something I picked up on Omega. If you can’t intimidate, irritate. Works wonders on krogan, trips them up like nothing else.”

He scanned the room, “And apparently the Prime Minister finds something about me incredibly irritating.”

Something lodged under the lip of the console gave off sparks before clinking to the floor. The bug was about as large as a human fingernail. Liara raised an eyebrow and scanned the door's console panel with her omni-tool.

“Did you really expect to trip him up into letting us go?”

Garrus sorted out a few more bugs tucked under the chairs before overloading the cameras. Smoke wisped from the shattered remains still fastened into the wall.

“That was a long shot.” he conceded, “But I can’t imagine he meant to leave us with our omni-tools.”

She laughed. It felt strange and rough, more like a cough than an expression of mirth.

"True enough, but I think this encryption is beyond either of us." she said.

She wasn't on par with Tali, but she could work her way around a door lock. This code was unlike anything she'd ever seen. As soon as she began hacking, it shifted, compensating faster than she could respond. For every firewall she got past, a dozen others flickered into place. What she wouldn't give for Shepard's custom algorithms.

Garrus took this into consideration, "There's always brute force."

"How much force?" she asked.

He rapped against the metal with his glove, "Looks like standard tellurium steel alloy. Reinforced."

They could only try and hope the door wasn't made with biotics in mind.

Space around her palm blue shifted, expanding and rippling over the floor to dissolve with a flare against the door’s shielding. The room spun in a sick moment before she could focus away the numb, prickling sensation from the back of her skull and try again as Garrus sent an arc of ionized particles flooding into the kinetic shielding, distorting the electromagnetic repulsion fluctuation for a thousand femtoseconds.

The room blurred and refocused, the sleeping limb sensation crawling over her scalp with any attempt at creating another shifting mass effect field. She was panting with the effort and sat down on the floor before her legs completely gave out.

Garrus frowned, inspecting the dull patch of metal at the door seam. White powder flaked away under his glove and a small divot appeared in the surface as the surrounding centimeter of metal turned brittle and fell away.

"Very reinforced." he sighed.

"I haven’t slept in the past week.” she said.

She didn't mention how much touching the shard had taken out of her.

Garrus nodded as if to commiserate and slumped into a nearby chair. His movements were stiff testaments to his own weariness.

Hunger clenched in her gut. When was the last time she bothered to eat? She couldn’t even recall. Nutrient bars didn’t count. It was a bad habit she picked up in the field. Bars were portable, quick, and didn’t get contaminating food particles over ancient dig sites. They also tasted like plant slime. Not the most appetizing, but her appetite wasn’t much lately regardless.

Hungry. Tired. Trapped.

It was a nostalgic scenario. Any minute now Shepard would appear to save the day with a mining laser.

"So we're bait?" she asked.

"Undoubtedly." Garrus said, tipping up his face to the ceiling and closing his eyes.

"I just wonder..." she traced figures onto the floor, "Why they thought it would work."

 Really, she wondered why it had worked.

Garrus was silent for a very long time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much everyone who has commented or read this fanfic! I'm so sorry this chapter update has taken so long, I was waylaid by a very demanding research literature review. Sounds fun right? 
> 
> Thankfully, the next chapter should not take nearly so long, it is mostly done and just needs some plot revision. I've very much enjoyed writing it as well. 
> 
> Thanks again to readers/commenters  
> <3 Dulcy


	4. The Reason Firm, the Temperate Will

Garrus waited.

Patience had been  his trade thrice over, but he was a man without profession after the Normandy touched down onto the crusted-over hardpan of an area Joker had identified as ‘15 minutes away from the smoldering ruins of the gambling capital of the planet, by shuttle, that is.’

Restless movement twitched through his fingers and he heard the sounds of ceramic against ceramic clicking all-too-familiar rhythms. Liara glanced at him for a moment, bleary-eyed, and he cursed silently. The last thing he wanted was a well-intended amateur psych eval before they got out of this mess.

He took inventory once again. Two omni-tools, one with offensive modifications and one without. One exhausted biotic. One sleep-deprived turian with extensive hand-to-hand combat expertise.

The list was far too short for his tastes. Their guns remained in storage lockers four minutes above his head by elevator, behind a guarded security checkpoint. He felt unbalanced, ready to tip over without the comforting chunk of metal and ceramic fastened to his armor.

Someone would return, he was certain of this. And if they knew what they were doing, they would take their time. Waiting was another thing that tripped most people up. The trick was getting the duration right, recognizing the moment when preparation cracks under the pressure of anticipation. Garrus knew how the mind games worked, but knowing wouldn’t stop the inevitable. He just had to hope they were as eager to underestimate as the Prime Minister had been.

He could hold his own with an omni-tool and subduing biotics, even exhausted ones, was always a tricky business. They were unarmed but still dangerous enough to put up a decent fight. Whoever returned would come with reinforcements.

Garrus considered their options.

“Liara, could I make some adjustments to your omni-tool?” he asked.

Liara’s head shot up from her lap, sleep fading from her eyes, “Oh!  My...my omni-tool. Yes, of course.”

She slipped her glove off, seals still unsnapped from earlier, and removed the device from her wrist.

“Careless of me I suppose,” Liara murmured, handing it over to him, “I never thought of improving on it...  I never thought I’d need to.”

“I don't have any tools, but I think I can manage a short-term disruption of standard armor shielding. It’s not much, I know, but it might help.”

He would have to alter the programming that synced to her armor’s power grid before any offensive modifications could be done. It would be enough to keep his next few hours occupied. His mandibles lost some of their tension, relaxing against his jaw, and his fingers settled into quick, deft motions as he typed up new bits of code into the omni-tool interface.

_‘Please tell me you aren’t going to fix that thing.’_

_Her hand was pressed against her brow as those full pink lips twitched with the effort not to smile._

_‘You’re a hell of a looker soldier.’ the VI chirped at her. The voice wasn’t bad really, the peppy tone was the only aspect that was completely off._

_Garrus grinned, a wolfish flare of the mandibles and a wink of sharp teeth. He traced a lazy path along her body with his eyes as his taloned fingers crossed the gap between them and smoothed along the curve of her waist._

_‘That you are.’_

Garrus blinked.

The omni-tool clattered to the floor.

That damned VI. She kept threatening him with a trip out the airlock when he got the copy she obtained from Mouse functional with a holographic interface.

_‘You’ve been spending too much time around our resident Prothean.’_

_Her smile was a thing of beauty, ‘In my cycle turians knew better than to question their superiors.’_

_The skin of her shoulder was slightly cool to the touch and fit perfectly against his palm. He liked that. They were so often awkward angles and ‘ouch, move this way’ as they found new ways to accommodate each other; that the moments when they did fit, perfectly and without effort, hummed through him like tiny electric shocks._

_‘I’m not a very good turian.’ he finally said, feeling the hum against his mouth plates as he kissed her._

“Garrus.” Liara was kneeling beside him, holding his hand tightly as a tremor reverberated through his bones, “Garrus..." 

He didn’t know he could dislike the sound of his own name so much--the way people started saying it, dangling it like a rope into a vast chasm of grief. It was the way he spoke to vics’ families before breaking the bad news and spending hours excavating their memories into hollow shells of what they once were.

He cut her off before she could finish, “I’m...fine Liara, fine. Just tired.”

She didn’t buy it and he didn't blame her, his subvocals were anything but steady, but she didn’t press the issue. Sitting back on her heels, Liara threw a glance at the shard. Neither of them had picked it up. Neither of them wanted to touch it.

“Did you mean what you said to the Prime minister? Do you really think that?”

Garrus sighed, “I don’t know.”

“It could be her.”

He fiercely hated the hopefulness in her voice. He wanted to stamp it out, crush it into a fine dust.

“Liara, that’s not Shepard. Shepard is...”

He still couldn’t say it. His breath hitched around the word and the moisture in his throat suddenly evaporated.

“It’s just a trap.”

The door panel turned green.

They were on their feet in seconds, Garrus already priming an energy draw from his shield batteries for an overload, his back flush with the wall, eyes fastened on the door, waiting for it to open.

  
It didn’t.

His eyes narrowed. They were waiting for him to do something idiotic like stick his head out and count exactly how many armed marines were out in the hallway. Well, let them wait, he was not about to make the inevitable defeat any easier.

Light flashed at the corner of his eye.

“There is no one in the hall.” Sh...it said, “The security system has been compromised, all the other rooms are in lockdown.”

Garrus and Liara traded a glance for a long moment, weighing the possibilities silently.

“We can’t exactly stay in here forever.” Liara finally said, faint blue gathering in her palm.

Trap or no, they couldn’t avoid springing it if they wanted to get out.  He edged closer to the panel and pressed it.

The hallway was dark, emergency lighting glowing in thin fluorescent strips along the ground. No heat signatures.

"Thank the Goddess” Liara’s palm dropped to her side and she turned to face it.

He didn’t like looking at it, so he fixed his eyes on the gleaming wall as blue light danced off the glass. In the corner of his eye, Liara approached the shard.

“Why are you helping us?” she asked.

"You should go.”

Spirits, the voice was just as bad. Even Legion managed a hint of emotional inflection.  He found himself glaring at the wall as if it had personally insulted him.

“All that Reaper tech can’t handle decent speech emulation?” he drawled.

It was not a question he planned on asking.  His words distorted somewhere in the distance between his brain and his mouth, twisting into a bitter parody of sarcasm.  

His willpower gave and he let himself look at her--really look at her--eyes drinking the curve of her waist, the sculpted musculature of her stomach just visible beneath the fabric of the casual military garb, the small indentation nestled at the base of her throat. The sight was the world’s most potent liquor and he binged with the desperation of a man wanting desperately to forget.  It made him warm and not just a little disoriented, his mind fuzzy with the tiny details of her.  

The hologram’s eyes snapped from the wall, fixing on him, "There is a floor below with access to an unguarded exit point. You should go."

“First, tell us why you’re helping us.” Liara said.

“I.”

Her shape splintered, flickering and staticky. In brief snatches, he could see her eyes, boring into him.

The synthetic voice unraveled into a hundred subvocals disharmonizing into a slew of pitches twisting the human spectrum of emotion into one chaotic thread. It pierced through his skull, grief, anger, happiness all at once.

“I am bound. To. _Protect you._ Imperatives.”

But he heard a hundred different words at once and couldn’t be sure exactly what it said. The words echoed in his skull and the echoes sounded like his own name, soft the way she said it when her forehead was pressed against his own.

“Cascading logic errors. I am. _Memories._ Data. I am. _Shepard._ Bound to imperatives. _You’ll never be alone_.”

Fragments coalesced into holographic whorls, thrumming to a silent pulse. His head throbbed along with it, ripples of coherent tones fading in and out too quickly to comprehend, pouring like water through the sieve of his consciousness.

“Isolating corruptive loops. _I’ll protect._ Stalemate _._ ”

The fragments of Shepard suddenly vanished, the glowing blue afterimage of her seared into his retinas.

Liara slipped her hand back into her glove, omni-tool already back around her wrist, and double checked that the seals had snapped shut properly.

"We should take the shard." she said.

Garrus started, Shepard’s ghostly tones still reverberating in his mind, "Reaper tech." he leveled an incredulous stare at her, "You want to carry a chunk of Reaper tech around and just hope for the best?"

He wasn’t fully convinced that the Reapers were responsible for all this. But he preferred to plan around the worst-case scenarios and exclude the possibility of surprise. With the Reapers, those surprises were always of the deadly and extremely unpleasant variety.

Lavender flushed her face and he could see the spike in her thermal signature through the lens of his visor, "I know this shard is linked to Shepard in some way. We can't just leave it here."

"We can and more importantly: we should."

Her jaw tightened, and she stepped forward, taking one of his restless hands into her own. It was impossible not to look at her upturned face and those ominously moist eyes.

“I heard her Garrus. I heard Shepard. This might be our chance. I don’t…I don’t want to give up on the hope that maybe we can get her back. I _can’t_ give up on it.”

_You’ll never be alone._

Damn it. Damn her. He pulled his hand away and turned towards the door.  

“Take it.” he said.  

Garrus activated his visor’s infrared settings, cranking up the sensitivity on the low-intensity end of the spectrum as high as possible. Neon green lines sprang up from the darkness, forming sparse architecture and the occasional flash of real warmth from the surveillance cameras bolted up high in the corners. He could see the indistinct curve of their lenses watching him.

He met the detached, mechanical stare, wondering who was on the other end of the image feed.

Hearing Liara come up behind him, Garrus began walking towards the elevator, trying to keep a slow pace for her unassisted vision. Despite his best efforts, when he stopped, she bumped into his armor, a tiny ‘ow’ accompanying the slight impact.

“Sorry.” he whispered.

Before they could wonder if the elevator was even functional, the doors slid open. When they stepped inside, Garrus found that he could not select any of the upper levels from the console.  

“I definitely don’t like this.” he said.

“Where will we find another way out?” Liara asked.

Before he could answer, the doors slammed shut and the elevator began descending.

“I thought we were on the lowest level.”

“Me too.” Garrus reached for his gun and cursed under his breath when his hands came up empty.

The descent halted and the doors opened to a brightly lit hallway. Pain lanced through his eye in the split second delay before his infrared setting kicked off, adjusting to the sudden influx of warmth. A white spot danced at the center of his vision.

The hallway was almost exactly identical to the last, but on closer examination, this one connected hundreds of rooms. Compact doors crammed into the walls every few meters, their panels merging into two parallel streaks of red light extending to the end of the corridor. Garrus peered into the double-fiber plated glass of the room—cell was more accurate, it could have only been two meters by two meters—and saw nothing except for a bare cot against the far wall.

“Hello?”

The voice was feminine and soft, muffled by the door.

“Hello?” Liara called back, beside him and peering through the glass. It was the blast-proof, bullet-proof, everything-proof fiber glass, the kind of glass they used for the Normandy’s viewports. It was thick, set into the heavy door.

“Is this a prison or a hospital?” Garrus asked.

“Are you a doctor?”

He noticed the sheet had been ripped from the bed, a corner of fabric trailed towards the wall where a shape huddled just out of view.

“We’re not here to hurt you.”  Liara pressed her fingers against the door, “Are you alright? Are you being held here against your will?”

The white bundle shifted, “No. I want to be here. I want to get better.”

“Are you sick?” she asked.

“The doctors say they can fix me.”

She sounded on the verge of panic, her voice going high and squeaky.

“What is wrong with you? What are they fixing?” he asked, internally wincing at how callous it ended up sounding. The trailing edge of the sheet had shifted away from the door and she was quiet for so long, he worried that he had scared her.

Liara shot him a glare and did her best to compensate.

“Don’t be afraid. We can help you. Do you need help? ”

The bundle moved closer to the door.  Blue light shone from sunken sockets of cybernetic flesh nestled within the sheets. Liara gasped in horror, jumping back into Garrus.  The husk stared at them for a moment longer before retreating back out of view.

A familiar voice, faintly accented, echoed through the hall.

  
“I’d say I’m surprised to see the both of you here but I had a bit of notice.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Phew. This ended up taking longer than I anticipated. Much apologies for the delay! Thank you so much to everyone who has read this and left feedback. You are all so wonderful.  
> <3 Dulcy


	5. Her Eyes as Stars of Twilight Fair

Miranda Lawson.  Clad in skintight material and a disdainful brand of confidence that seemed to display with equal physicality how little she cared about outside opinion.  A bundle of jumbled reactions twinged through his facial plates at seeing her, of all people, inexplicably buried in the hidden levels of a top secret Alliance base turned disturbing hospital/prison.  Rather than sort them out one by one, Garrus settled for the overall impression that he would be far more comfortable with his gun in hand. Wary energy pooled in his fingers, seeking out the reassuring pressure of ceramic and finding emptiness.

“Miranda, good to see you.” Liara said, bridging the silent gap with amicability a hair too professional to be truly sincere.

Bemusement fluttered across Miranda's features, evidence of her belief in that statement.

“Let’s skip the pleasantries for the moment if you don’t mind.” She turned heel and began to walk away with the silent implication to follow.

Blue pinpricks of light watched them from the cell interiors, beaming eerie curiosity into the hallway.

The lab had all the spaciousness of a repurposed closet. Medical equipment crowded the counters and an examination table accounted for the majority of free floor space. Garrus leaned against a counter furthest from the console and chair, jostling an environmental suit hanging from the wall in the process. Liara lingered by the doorway.

Miranda declined the chair and leaned over to activate the console interface.

“I hacked the surveillance feed from the upper levels about a day ago, “she shifted so they could see the screen.  Save for two parallel lines of emergency lighting, it was entirely dark.

"It was no easy task. The security in this place is like nothing I've ever seen, but I suppose one might expect robust network protection in a geth research facility."

"Geth research?" Liara asked, curiosity drawing her closer into the room.

Miranda didn't look up, "Yes, from what I've gathered, this facility was designed to study deactivated geth specimens obtained by the Alliance after the Battle of the Citadel"

She gestured over towards an environmental suit hanging from the wall, "It was purged and abandoned during the war. And made somewhat habitable again in short order, although I personally would avoid extended stay in the cells."

Her fingers tapped an area of the keyboard and the hallway was bright again. Seconds later, a familiar figure emerged into view from one of the doorways.

"The Prime Minister, how lucky for you both. Have a nice chat?"

“What about the feed from the room?” he asked, shifting in an attempt to disperse the frenetic energy pooling in his limbs. The room seemed to contract even closer around him.

“I’m good but I’m not that good. Surveillance feeds in the rooms all run through a separate network with even tighter security. They've partitioned the entire system. Research levels like this one only have access to certain networks.” her full lips grimaced, “Clever, unfortunately.”

"What about the power?"

She frowned "I can't even access that partition from any of the consoles on this level. Whoever did must have had higher security clearance and extensive access to the levels below...and they would have had to be in the building."

Garrus frowned, turning over possibilities in his head.

“Why are you here Miranda?”  Liara moved forward, only a few steps between Miranda and himself.

“Am I spying on the Alliance’s secret projects, is that what you mean?” the woman bristled, “Hardly. I’m here voluntarily. Or so they tell me. Like many ex-Cerberus stranded in Sol, I took the Alliance up on a generous offer.”

Her smile was sarcastic testament to the actual generosity of the arrangement.  She straightened and folded her arms across her chest.

“I’m here because of the Lazarus project.  We’re attempting to extrapolate the process in an effort to reverse the handiwork of the Reapers.”

“Is that why that husk was able to speak?” Garrus asked.

“No, strangely enough, the nanide suppression of cerebral functionality had already been reversed.  Mostly we’re working on the physical: restoring epidermal tissues and the like. The mental changes occurred prior to the Sol relay activation. We have ground troop accounts of unusual husk activity the day Shepard...”

She trailed off and Garrus felt something sharp wrench in his gut.

“Disappeared” He finished for her.

It was the first time he had seen Miranda’s arrogant façade falter.  Her lip trembled and she inhaled suddenly and sharply so that the air rattled, hollow, in her throat. In a second the crack vanished, her shiny veneer in place and flawless.

“Yes, well.  I’ve been able to obtain the files from other research teams through some…creative means. We're kept separate--much like how Cerberus used to operate. The psychological analysis is intriguing.  From my personal experience dealing with the subjects, I can honestly say that most are still generally unaware of what they have become.  We encourage this idea. The official story is that they have contracted a Reaper nanovirus—not too far off base if you ignore some rather monumental details.”

“How is that possible?” Liara interrupted, “Surely they are aware of the machinery.”

Miranda gave a sad smile, “The human mind is quite adept at dealing with delusion.  Those who are aware are heavily sedated to prevent serious self-injury.”

There it was, a gap left to linger in the isopropyl air for a fraction of a second.  Hesitation.  

“There’s something else, isn’t there?” Garrus pressed.

She paused mid-breath, steeling herself against reluctance before exhaling out the rest, “Yes. I found something while I was digging around some of the confidential research files.”

Whipping back around, she typed a brief command and a display flashed up. He wasn’t sure, but it appeared to be a strand of some sort of helical structure.

“Is that human DNA?” Liara asked.

“Yes.  Specifically, it is the DNA of one Commander Shepard.”

The energy buzzing through his body evaporated, nearly taking his strength with it. He gripped the edge of the counter.

“The Illusive Man, despite his faith in Project Lazarus, was not a man to exclude alternative solutions.  As we’re all very aware, cloning was considered before

Lazarus began to show real results.”

Colors faded into half-tones, shifting around him in dizzy fractals. The counter pressed into his palms through his gloves. He could almost feel the coolness of it seeping through the material and into his skin.

Miranda forged ahead, speaking rapidly as if, now committed, she wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible, “Cloning was…not ideal for a variety of reasons. He wanted the Shepard who survived Mindoir and saved the Citadel, the Shepard shaped by her environment. Cloning threw a whole new set of stimuli into the mix, and the end result was…not desirable. Even with implanted memories, it wasn’t enough. And then there is the issue of accelerated growth necessary to produce an adult in time to stop the Collectors.  Telomere degeneration ensured that even after we halted the accelerated growth transcription, she would be dead within a decade from gene degradation--”

“Enough.” Garrus snarled, “She’s not your damn science experiment.”

Liara’s hand was on his arm and he realized that his back was no longer pressed against the edge of counter. The tiny space between the three of them had diminished almost completely. Miranda remained unmoved and unintimidated, condescension etched into the delicate arch of her dark brows as her eyes rose to meet his glare.

Garrus stepped back.  Miranda continued, summarily dismissing his outburst.

“I don’t know what the Alliance is planning doing with this data. It is partially corrupted.”

“Where did they find this data in the first place?” Liara asked, glancing at Garrus with a concern that pricked at his conscience.

“Gleaned from defunct Cerberus facilities no doubt.” Miranda shrugged with an attempt at nonchalance that translated far differently in the tense jerk of her shoulders, “Whichever ones are accessible at the moment.”

“And I’m sure they had no help from you finding those.” Garrus cut in

“It was that or a treason charge, so yes.”

Miranda might possess a host of perfect attributes but the one in which she truly excelled was self-preservation.  He couldn’t resist the opportunity to goad her out of the superiority act. The initial shock of seeing Shepard’s DNA on the monitor had worn off, a stim rush settling down into his blood to render the world into the sharp lines and vivid colors of high-clarity perception. Miranda’s brittle defense mechanisms were all too exploitable and he wanted, fiercely, to see them disintegrate.

He crossed his arms and stepped back to lean against the counter, “Your loyalty has always been impressive.”

She paused, hiding away the irritation and flushing despite her best attempt, “At the time, I did not know what they were looking for. If I had known, I would have told them nothing.”

“Like you told the Illusive Man nothing?”

Something like happiness hit him the moment her eyes flashed beneath the heavy fringe of her eyelashes. Her face crumpled up into a hundred lines flowing together into currents of raw emotion. Shame. Anger. Grief. Regret. Pain. He watched her crumble with vicious satisfaction.

“That was different. It was before I even knew her.” She hissed.

“We know, Miranda.” Liara interjected, attempting to dissipate the palpable hostility by resting a hand on the tense line of the woman’s shoulder.

For a long moment, Miranda met his gaze before finally looking away, shaking her head ruefully and turning to retrieve an OSD from the console.

“I don’t trust the Alliance and the feeling is mutual.” She glanced up at Liara, “For good reason.”

She pressed the slim piece of metal into the asari’s hand, “You probably don’t have much time. You should go.”

“You could come with us.” Liara offered, gripping Miranda’s hand, holding the OSD between their palms, “We have to stop the Alliance from using this data. Shepard...she wouldn’t want to be used like this.”

“No, I need to finish my work here.” she glanced at Garrus, “I trust that the two of you can manage on your own.”

“Is there another exit? Another way to reach the surface?”

“Not that I know of. Just the elevator. Whoever is controlling the systems....” she trailed off.

Liara let their hands drop, clutching her hands into fists, “I suppose we’ll have to hope that whoever it is, is on our side.”

“Nothing like blind optimism in lieu of a plan.” Garrus said, leveraging himself away from the counter.

They left the room in silence, traversing the cell-studded hall and stopping at the beckoning, open doors of the elevator. Garrus didn’t like it. Blind optimism wasn’t his strong suit. He excelled in practical cynicism and practical cynicism dictated that they attempt to find another exit.

“There has to be another way.” he muttered.

Liara was silent. She turned over the OSD in her glove for a moment, staring at it.

“Why did you act that way towards Miranda?”

“Does it really matter right now Liara? We need to find a way out.”

Liara spun around to face him, “You aren’t angry with Miranda, Garrus, you’re angry with Shepard.”

 

He wasn’t angry.  

Angry was the primal roar reverberating in his skull, a radar etching Butler’s fluid-choked gasps into his memory as the man bled out on a filthy mat in Omega. It was the name ‘Sidonis’ on his breath and the carvings in his visor.  It was Shepard’s head between his scope and revenge.  Anger sparked, it burned, a red phosphorus flare smoldering in the dark spaces of the universe.  

There was no word for what he was. If anger could have matter, he would exist in its identical and simultaneously antithetical form, spinning down instead of up, a negative charge where there should be a positive. It burned--without flame, without light--like cryogen.

He had no wrongs to right--she couldn’t even leave him with that-- no righteous indemnity to exact from the hero who snatched them back from certain destruction.

He sure as hell wasn’t grateful, he knew that much.

“Garrus, oh Goddess, I am so very sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t know what’s come over me”

Distress furrowed a network of blue lines into her forehead and her eyes were ominously moist, full of regret. He didn’t know how to handle crying. This entire situation was so beyond what he knew how to handle, it was almost laughable.

“It’s alright Liara,” he activated his omni-tool to avoid meeting her watery concern, “I’ve been on edge lately, you’re right to…”

He had a message.

Immediately, Garrus checked the mid and short-range frequency channels. Jammed.

“What is it?” Liara’s curious eyes peered closer to see the pulse of light indicating a new message.

The sender address was an assortment of miscellaneous symbols. Garrus shook his head and selected it on the omni-tool, “We’re about to find out.”

_Advise immediate evacuation of facility. Route will be provided._

Garrus attempted to ping back the address and received an immediate error prompt due to the interference.

Cursing under his breath, he pulled up the attachment. The facility’s schematics popped up mid-air, a single elevator shaft branching into layers of hallways and rooms beneath the surface.

“Goddess.” Liara breathed

“There’s a tramway.” Garrus pointed at one of the floors and the extended corridor leading off the schematic map. A green path connected it to their location, indicating the alternate route from the message.

“We could bypass the security checkpoint.”

“If it’s even operational.” He pointed out.

“It’s still our best option.”

Checking over the schematic, he had to admit that it was. Liara might be able to fit into the vents, but it looked like they were designed to deter that idea, abrupt ascents and descents spanning dangerous heights marking the passage above ground. And she was far too exhausted to overcome those obstacles with biotics.

Garrus looked up at the elevator.

“Blind optimism it is.”

 

“Of course.” Liara mumbled to his back.

The level was completely dark, devoid of even the emergency lighting strips from the previous floor.  
  
Garrus flicked on the infrared setting on his visor and stepped forward, wanting to get out of the elevator as quickly as possible lest it decide to continue moving on its own volition. His boot collided into something and the metallic clatter echoed in the darkness.

“What was that?” Liara mustered a weak biotic glow in her hand and held it down to the ground.

It was a pile of deformed metal. Blue light etched the hulking shape of it into the cavernous mouth of the abandoned station. In the distant dim, Garrus could make out other shapes, other heaps crowding the space.

Liara bent down, taking the piece resting by his foot and turning it over in her hand for a moment. It was cylindrical, ending in a round curving glass lens. As she picked it up, sections disintegrated, leaving a film of grey powder in her hands.

“Garrus...this is...”

He could see them now, in the piles. Shreds of synthetic muscle tissues clinging to desiccated metal plates. Analogues of limbs, arms, heads heaped into careless piles. Geth. A graveyard of geth.

The elevator doors closed behind them.

“Too late to go back now.” he said, trying to keep the disquiet out of his sub vocals.

“What could the Alliance have possibly wanted with all these deactivated geth?” Liara asked as they began picking their way through the piles.

“Tali’s father ran experiments on deactivated geth.” Garrus pushed against a wall of metal and felt it give away beneath his glove, fine powder drifting like dust motes in the light of Liara’s biotic glow.

He stopped for a moment to refit his respirator. The device had been a permanent fixture on his armor since their descent into the ruination of Earth’s atmosphere. It hissed and an aerosol mist of medi-gel droplets cooled the back of his tongue and throat.

He continued on, “But he devoted his life to studying the geth, the Alliance couldn’t have come close to what he was doing.”

As they cleared the piles, Garrus could see the faint green outline of the tram hulking in the station and the massive section of ceiling that had jostled loose and crushed the rear half of it.

The state of the tram, however, was not the most pressing issue on his mind: it was the distinctive scrape of metal on metal and the figure that crept from the dark recess of the vehicle into clear view.

Garrus nearly shouted a warning out of sheer habit. But the geth were allies now, Legion had rewritten the heretic code, they had fought against the Reapers side-by-side with organics.  He primed an overload and waited.

His omni-tool blinked.

_We intend no harm. This platform has been repurposed to aid you._

Garrus cast a wary look at the figure and decided that ‘platform’ was a charitable term. The geth was little more than a synthetic spinal column and decayed metal limbs. He checked his omni-tool, finding that the short-wave interference had ceased.

_Why?_

The response was immediate. _Our aid is reciprocal in nature_

“What does that mean?” Liara asked after he repeated it aloud for her. His brow plates shifted together and he typed into the device.

 _You need something from us?_  

_No. We sought aid from the Intelligence. In exchange, 826 runtimes have infiltrated this facility for the purpose of securing your release. The estimated odds of your continued survival in this facility are low._

“Being trapped in this tram station isn’t my idea of escape.” Garrus muttered.

“The Intelligence....” Liara whispered, “Do they mean...do they mean whatever spoke to us earlier?”

_What is the Intelligence and what does it want with us?_

_Unknown. The Intelligence assumes the identity of the human spectre Commander Shepard but it does not possess the characteristic features of an organic life form. Technological advancement is beyond that of known organic species. Speech and logic processes do not indicate significant emotive input._

_Is it a Reaper?_

_Unknown. The Old Machines did not indicate preference for the preservation of organic life. The Intelligence has indicated otherwise. It is the reason we have restored functionality to this platform._

“To save us...” Liara said.

Garrus didn’t want to think about what that meant. He couldn’t afford to think about it.

_How is this platform going to get us to the surface?_

_Structural damage to the tramway was sustained during the invasion of the Old Machines. The maintenance tunnel was weakened but remains intact. This platform will guide your progress to the surface._

Garrus didn't mention that he doubted the platform could do anything, much less guide them through a unstable maintainence shaft.

_What happens when we reach the surface?_

_We advise the immediate departure from Earth. Approximately 3.2 hours ago, Admiral Steven Hackett of the Alliance Navy was declared unfit for service due to allegations of indoctrination. Alliance Prime Minister Anthony Briggs has declared further suspicion against the colleagues of Commander Shepard stationed aboard the SSV Normandy frigate-class starship. Approximately 3.0 hours ago, the SSV Normandy frigate vessel was identified leaving the Sol system._

* * *

Her ankle presses a red mark into the skin of her calf but she can’t feel it, they’ve gone numb from sitting cross-legged for so long. Above her, the stars bead together like glittering condensation in the night sky.

She knows every constellation. Or rather, she knows that she _should_ know them. The names don’t come.

The numbness has crept up from her legs. Stems of grass trace patterns against her thighs, and stubborn puffs of dandelion fuzz cling to her kneecap. She feels nothing.

_Corrective logic application to aberrant loops._

The names don’t really matter and one by one the stars wink out in the void.

“Freckles.”

“That’s not a real constellation Dad.” she says.

His finger traces a light pattern across her nose, connecting the dots and forming a jumbled geometric pattern, “It is now. Officially.”

One constellation remains.

A corona of pain encases her body. White hot needles lance her feet, her calves, her knees.

She screams.

“Hey Freckles. Name that one for me.”

The sky is full of stars and she can name them all.

  
_Application unsuccessful._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For some reason, I hit a complete writing funk during this chapter for a solid two weeks. But, true to form, the second a unrelated deadline loomed, my brain decided to snap into obsessing over this fic. The moral of this anecdote is that my brain is a jerk.
> 
> Additionally, I would like to credit the verses being used in the chapter titles, they are from the poem 'She Was a Phantom of Delight' by William Wordsworth.
> 
> Much love to those reading/liking/commenting. You are the best!  
> -Dulcy


	6. Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill

Liara could smell the sputtering molecular exhaust of her own biotic flare: the acid tang of eezo prickling through her sinus passages like the wasabi powder Shepard ate with everything (one of Liara's more unfortunate forays into human cuisine, the allergic reaction was immediate, painful, and accompanied by constant sneezing).

They’d been making slow progress through the crumbling ruin of concrete and twisted rebar that had once been a maintenance tunnel running adjacent to the tramline. Ahead, the dilapidated motion of the geth wavered between the dimmest reaches of light and complete darkness. Behind, she could barely hear Garrus making his slower progress, constantly checking for movement or heat signatures in the dark at their back. Her omni-tool blinked staccato pulses signifying that the geth had already responded to the question she had only just typed out.

_The acquisition of the Creators' research facilitated the replication of memory core restoration procedures. Approximately 7 of 86 units retained memory core functionality after facility purge. The presence of these functional units permitted reactivation and infiltration within a span of 4.2 Earth hours after carrier signal uplink to the Consensus. These programs were then able to salvage and reconstruct physical platforms._

Liara wondered if the acquisition occurred with or without the permission of the quarians.

Time warped underground, pooling, thick with gravity, against its frame. It felt like they had been walking for weeks; the austere facility a thing that had happened once, long ago, already bleached and faded. Even faster fading were her memories from touching the shard, all worn to tattered scraps of an ancient cloth that crumbled when she touched it.

Flecks of grey ceiling clattered down around them, disappearing into the grasping shadows as they passed under one of many sections of buckled slabs groaning ominously. Fear fissured through her, spider webbing into delicate veins of adrenaline.

Grateful for the preoccupation of obtaining useful intel, Liara sifted through zetabytes of stolen Alliance intel courtesy of the geth consensus, casting a keyword net for any Cerberus research pertaining to Shepard and letting it compile.

Keywords: Cerberus. Tissue Restoration. DNA. Commander Shepard.

101,045 results.

“Gly...” she stopped.

As obnoxious as the VI was initially, she was surprised to feel a sentimental pang when she remembered that he was packed up with the rest of her gear in the Normandy hangar, awaiting a destination. Sorting through this mess would take her days without him.

Liara grimaced. Well, she did need a distraction.  

It was one of those deep, inscrutable fears: Prothean ruins creeping into her worst nightmares, the ground opening up to swallow her whole. Except now she was wide awake, and there was nothing irrational about the sense that any minute now, the whole tunnel could collapse on top them.

Side-stepping a jutting sag of tunnel ceiling, Liara scrolled through the search results, tailoring down her keywords as she went, tightening her net, scrolling through the barely relevant to find the important. In fact, it was a process remarkably similar to her field research. Becoming an information broker wasn't too far a career leap from academia. She was still unearthing buried truths, still sifting through the mundane.

14,001 results.

She smiled in her satisfaction. That was much better. Glyph housed the majority of her more sophisticated data analysis programs, but her omni-tool had a decent array thanks to her inability to take the drone into the sort places Shepard was fond of frequenting, places that inevitably involved gunfire and political red tape.

Liara typed a rapid command sequence and let the analysis programs work their magic, sorting research notes, internal communications, shipping manifests, inventory updates, and everything in between.

Several corrupted files popped up in the interim, but one in particular caught her attention and sent her pulse wild.

It was a series of garbled numbers and code degrading into corrupted data. It had been retrieved, already partially overwritten. Someone had tried to erase it and recently. And that someone would have been in the facility.

Thunder rumbled, a quiet crumbling echo rushing through the concrete like a roaring ocean current. She stumbled back against the wall, feeling the air rush from her lungs and the dizzy tingle of intense focus as the fissuring grey above her head shot up with blue ripples. Over the thunderous slide of stone and earth, she could barely register Garrus' shout before pain flared at her temple.

_“How have you been?”_

_Silence had worked so far on the other doctors. She fiddles with the packet of juice on her bedside table and waits for him to get uncomfortable enough to drop the meaningless questions and just glance at the datapad in his hand to make sure everything was normal—minus the collapsed lung and shattered ribs._

_He doesn’t. He lets the room fill up with her silence. She can still feel his eyes on her and realizes that this one actually wants an answer. He sits down in the chair next to her bed and sets down the datapad. Her pupils trace the motion from the corners of her eyes as if the rectangle of metal and carbon glass is made out of sharp and dangerous edges._

_“There’s no wrong answer.” He prompts._

_“I’m fine.”_

_He smiles, thinly, his puffy lips deflated by profound disappointment and compressing down into a serious line._

_“You’ve suffered a seriously traumatic experience. “_

_So there is a wrong answer. She makes a mental note._  

_“The doctors say you refuse to answer to your first name? Why is that?”_

_The room expands, a giant lung depressurizing. She can feel the air thin around her, sucked to the corners and out the door and window._

_“What should I call you?” he asks with a gentleness that seems more acquired than innate._

_She doesn’t want him to call her anything and she doesn’t want to give him a reason to stay. The silver foil of the juice packet crinkles. It’s supposed to taste like oranges but like everything meant for human consumption in this place--it did a terrible job of it._

_“Nothing? So you’re just a Jane Doe then?”_

_She shrugs to show how little she cares but she likes the idea.  Jane Doe.  It’s like a name could be something as mundane as a pen stylus, something you could lose and then borrow. Jane Doe is a pen that has been borrowed so much and by so many people that it doesn’t belong to anyone anymore; the individuality worn down by thousands of hands, no fresh teeth marks around the end, no stickers peeling off the plastic, no logo from the company her mother worked at. Mendel Biotech in green, bold letters curving around into a leaf. She drops the packet back onto the table without realizing._

_“Okay then... Jane.  I’m here to help you deal with what happened. “_

"Liara?"

Her mouth was tacky and when she tried to speak, the words slurred together.

“Liara?” Garrus asked again before dissolving into a fit of coughs.

Medi-gel congealed the powdered concrete residue into a thick, sticky gel coating her tongue. She gulped, fighting back the choking sensation enough to rip off her auto-assemble breathing mask before turning her head and vomiting.  Wiping her mouth with the back of her glove and feeling sediment grind against her teeth, she focused on assessing the state of her extremities.

Wetness trickled down into her eye from an aggressively bleeding gash that didn't feel serious enough to merit however long she had been unconscious. Probing the edge, she wondered if she could spare any medi-gel currently not being utilized to clear her lungs of damaging particulates.

"How long was I out?" she asked.

Garrus' voice was particularly raspy and she had a hard time understanding when he said, "Not sure, you shielded us from the worst of it with a barrier. Less than a minute maybe."

He grunted in the dark and she heard the heavy grind of stone.

"Garrus? Are you alright?"

Pushing back the dizzy spin of excessive medi-gel and adrenaline, she summoned up a pathetic flare of biotic light.

The ceiling had held above them, but only a meter to her right, the dark rivet in the concrete above them branched into a solid wall of crumbling earth and twisted threads of metal bars. There was no sign of the geth.

Garrus' arm was wrong somehow, limp and dangling below the joint of his elbow. He shifted, wincing as he brought it close enough to his dominant hand to pull up the omni-tool interface. The orange overlay flickered intermittently.

"Damnit."

"Mine's functional." Liara said, knowing that it wasn't much of a consolation for the fact that he was effectively weaponless.

Her omni-tool blinked.

_Platform damage sustained. Please do not assist, further instability may occur._

Liara closed her eyes against the twist of terror, tilting her chin upwards to stem the steady flow of blood into her eyes. The small effort cost her, turning the world light and flickering. Trapped.

Garrus said something to her but his voice is fading into a wordless background static. Blue flames smoldered in her palm, casting his look of alarm into long dark shadows until he merges, completely, into the dark.

_Her teeth sink into her bottom lip and she hopes it looks like she’s about to cry. It’s the one trick she can’t learn and the one everyone wants to see._

_“It’s okay to feel sad, or angry, or even feel like none of this is real. You just need to talk to someone about it.”_

_He’s lying to her again.  Angry is another wrong answer. She knows where angry kids go._

_Angry gets you a prison made for children with issues. It gets you bright pills and therapy sessions.  It gets you arts and crafts. He looks at her like she’s a fragile thing, ready to break into pieces. It’s the same look the nurses give her._

_She swallows her anger and smiles ferociously, "I feel fine."_

"You sound like Shepard"

_Shepard.  It winks up at her from the security badge attached to her mother’s lab coat. Gone now, disintegrated into ash with the rest of her._

"Liara, you need to stay conscious, I think you have a concussion."

_The IV drip is a constant plinking metronome. She counts the drips while the good doctor waits, trying to get her to speak up first. 535, 536. It’s a game she’s going to win but he doesn’t know he’s being hustled yet.  540, 541. Drip drop. With the both of them refusing to speak, it sounds preternaturally loud._

_543, 545, 550. It’s louder, faster, drips blurring together as the metronome breaks time, dissolving into the liquid gurgle of flowing water. She can’t count them anymore, they’re coming so fast, so cold, seeping up around her bed, her sheet floating away on a black current, catching on a jutting piece of concrete.  As she reaches for it, the water pulls it under and it’s gone--vanished beneath the unfathomable surface._

_Her omni-tool blinks on her wrist, skipping light over the gleaming dark surface. One blink. Two blinks._

Garrus cursed eloquently.

She started, the lapping of water against her legs a tactile reassurance that it was, in fact, real.

Well. That was certainly not a good sign.

Liara pulled up the omni-tool interface and simultaneously blessed and cursed the illumination.

“Goddess...”

The water wasn’t deep, but by the light of her Omni-tool she could see the rivulets trickling from the fissures in the wall. It smelled like mildew and decaying things. Liara winced, drawing her knees up to her chest and out of the filthy wetness.

Garrus laughed, tightly wound vocal chords ratcheting even tighter, his chuckle something mechanical about to break from strain,  “At least I won’t have to swim.”

“The facility’s drain pipe must run above the service tunnel.” Liara said.

“Death by engineering efficiency.” he grimaced, “I’ll admit, I never saw that one coming.”

Liara pulled up her incoming message.

_Platform repair failure. We estimate low survival odds._

She closed the message immediately, glancing at Garrus.

“Let me guess,” he shifted his broken arm, wincing, “More bad news?”

“Do you know...” she spoke conversationally, as if they weren't deep underground, as if the tunnel wasn’t slowly but surely flooding,  as if they were the type of friends who could talk casually about terror, “Did you know that I’m terrified of being buried alive underground?”

He regarded her with a sardonic lift of a brow plate, “So naturally you chose a profession that involved being underground for the most part.”

“It was more of a recent development.” she answered. Prothean ruins loomed up in the shadows of her mind.  

She hugged her knees tighter to her chest, “There’s a method for dealing with fear that the asari have embraced: submergence. The idea is that you submerge yourself to the worst possible version of your fear to find peace.”

Garrus was silent for a moment and they both felt the missing joke. The kind of cheesy Shepard line whipped out in the face of imminent demise with a flippant half-smile and dangerous eyes.

_“You come here every day.”_

_Liara could see the soft tilt of her lips faintly reflected in a field of stars, “That’s not much of a secret.”_

_“Of course not.” Liara said, “The real secret is why when you have a perfectly good view from your cabin.”_

_Purple tendrils of ionized gas bloomed into a distant nebulae. It was an unremarkable sight for anyone accustomed to interstellar transit. Viewports were relics of cheesy adventure holos on the romance of space. Irradiated clouds of gas rendered through the lens of heroism and exploration. She doubted Shepard bought into any of that._

_Shepard hit the shutters and turned, a strange expression flitting through her eyes, there and gone almost before Liara could identify what it was. Crossing her arms, Shepard regarded her with a smile she had known from other attempted forays into personal territory.  A ‘keep out’ sign._

_“Sounds like the kind of secret the Shadow Broker would want to have in a dossier somewhere”_

_Her elbows were rigid, pinning her hands down as if attempting to hold them down, to hold herself down._

_Liara let it drop, returning the smile with one of her own,  “Too bad we have no idea who she is.”_

For someone as famous as Shepard, mysteriousness was an elusive quality. The hero of the Alliance, the savior of the Citadel, people couldn’t know enough about her. After her death above Alchera, every week turned up someone from Shepard’s past; a classmate from ATAJ she’d once dated, a woman on the Citadel she had once given advice to, a hanar she’d insulted.  A quick search on the extranet pulled up troves of information: everything from her ancestral records to her favorite foods. Most of it was wildly inaccurate.

And yet despite that, Shepard could be paradoxically, frustratingly, inscrutable when she wanted to be. No matter how hard she dug, Liara only found more questions, more allusions to secrets she didn’t even existed--like why Admiral Steven Hackett, wrote an enrollment recommendation for the Advanced Training Academy for Juveniles for a civilian girl still recovering in a psych ward; or why Shepard never talked about her family…ever.

The truth was that there were many things she didn't know about Shepard. But she did know fear, even as ephemeral and fleeting as the expression had been on Shepard’s face that day. She knew what it was like to stand defiant before the gaping maw of terror.

Liara curled her hand in on itself, “Talking about facing fears, I can’t help but think of Shepard and her viewports.”

A glimpse of a genuine smile flared at his left mandible. Garrus tilted his head up, resting his fringe against the wall, staring off absently.

“It was an entirely different story whenever Chakwas wanted to do anything more invasive than a body scan.”

“Only Shepard would classify a punctured lung as a minor respiratory ailment. Good thing Chakwas was just as stubborn as she was.”

Garrus chuckled, “After we returned from the collector base, she tried convincing Chakwas that seeing double was actually an improvement and not the result of a serious concussion.”

Shepard--real and alive and aboard the Normandy, butting heads with Chakwas, rehashing old ICT stories over reconstituted dinners in the mess, exchanging mods and new firmware with Garrus and Tali, leaning against the door and coaxing her out of her room for a crushing round of Skyllian Five. She could hear Ashley's victory crow, the sound of cards shuffling, the taste of brandy and bravado.

In the small cache at her belt, the fragment throbbed.

Granules of concrete tumbled down to plink into the water, the ruin to their left shuddering, low and quiet.

Liara leapt up, bracing herself against the wall for the next collapse, the one that would take them out for sure.

For a moment, she thought she was passing out again, darkness forming a pinpoint at the center of the wall, spreading out to encompass it in an oil black sheen. In a sudden moment, the darkness flared brilliant, blinding blue, dazzling Liara's eyes with the white afterimages of a vast network of light that was there and then gone in a second. The darkness receded to the precariously canted ceiling, and with it, the solid mass of collapsed tunnel.

"It looks like..." she paused.

Metal. Through the pulsing white criss crossing her pupils, Liara could see the dull sheen of dark metal segments covering the ceiling, scaffolds solidified over the fissures.

A sound pulled her attention away from the reconstructing tunnel.

It was the geth...but where missing sections and appendages were, dark threads pulsing blue light intersected in the gaps, a scaffold etched in fine, shimmering lines. The entire body was speckled with glittering flecks of black and luminescent blue. Liara squinted, realizing that the shimmering was _motion_. A thousand microscopic specks roiling and heaving in one concerted mass.

“It’s moving.” She breathed.

“Nanites.” Garrus answered.

Liara reached into her pocket and grasped the shard. There was only one species she knew of with nanite technology like this.

"But Reaper nanites can only function in organic tissue. It doesn't make sense. Perhaps the Geth developed nanite technology somehow."

The geth spoke aloud.

"The Intelligence has modified the Old Machines’ nanite technology to exist without the aid of organic components. They comprise a purely synthetic gestalt consciousness elevated beyond our comprehension.”

“I thought the Geth learned their lesson when it came to the Reapers.” Garrus remarked, disgusted.

“By our analysis, the Old Machines and the Intelligence are linked, but separate entities.”  
  
Black encrusted panels offsetting the central photoreceptive lens fluttered emphasis.

“That link is reason enough not to trust it.”

“We will explain evidence for our conclusions after departure from Earth. Imminent departure is highly recommended.”

“At least we can agree on that.” Liara sighed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am really terrible at consistent updating. I'm so sorry! I'm really excited to get everyone off Earth and...discovering things, mysterious things. All grammar issues (likely with random and arbitrary comma placement) are mine and my own, please excuse my lack of editing.  
> As always, thank you so much for reading.  
> -Dulcy


End file.
